The dangers of experiential spam
Experiential marketing may be flavour of the month, but so is experiential spam, warns Alan Riva
Experiential Spam, which I can best explain as a disconnect between a brand and an audience created by a forced or unwanted interaction developed to interrupt, rather than enhance a customer’s day, is a very real problem.
And it’s been getting worse since the experiential wave hit Australia. Almost overnight an entire industry changed their descriptor (and little else) from Promotional Staffing to Experiential Agency. Many others just tagged the word onto their credentials without any real understanding of how to deliver results.
Think of the last time you were rushing to a meeting and someone approached you on a street corner in a branded cap and t-shirt, thrusting a sample into your hand with a barely audible and even less believable promise that this product is somehow going to change your day.
Or think of those times you are rushing to catch a flight and a guy standing behind a flimsy, branded counter tries to stop you yards from your gate to sell you financial services. Granted these are experiences, but not ones that leave your consumer full of love for the brand or leave you wanting more.
These sorts of encounters are the experiential equivalent of telemarketing, door to door sales or spam and you risk engendering consumer ambivalence or worse annoyance and the accompanying wash of negative word of mouth for your brand.
So how do you avoid some of the common pitfalls?
For brand owners I would suggest firstly getting to know the experiential demands of your audience. As with any form of communication, the way we respond to an experience varies depending on factors such as gender, age, the product category, context of the experience and our mindset at the moment of interaction.
Secondly, getting tougher on your briefs will help you get the outcomes you really want from your agency.
For example, ask them to deliver 100,000 targeted samples of your brand and you are immediately giving permission for a mass distribution response that pushes your brand onto your audience in an often disrespectful manner.
Challenge your agency to come back with a measurable trial objective but also, and importantly, one that measures success on conversion and ultimately a deeper relationship between you and your customers.
For real practitioners of experiential marketing, the stiffer such challenges to drive real behavioural change, the more exciting it gets. So make sure you have the right expert agency partner by your side, one that understand how to create brand experience architectures and execute them flawlessly.
Just as experiences are powerful, experiential spam can not only undo all that good work, it can cause serious damage to a brand with the knock on effect bound to be felt for a long, long time.
- Alan Riva is director of experiences at Kaleidoscope Marketing Communications. A version of this article first appeared on his blog, The Experience Age
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That all sounds a bit confusing but I agree with the sentiment, I dislike ‘unwanted interaction developed to interrupt, rather than enhance a customer’s day’. simply put as a consumer I want something that either
1. Add’s Value, so that I don’t mind a disruption (fair swap for my time)
OR
2. Removes some pain from my day / interaction / experience, and as such is a bonus (such as a free massage at an airport whilst waiting for a flight, rather then a dreary conversation about my credit card).
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Does it work though? What percentage of people actually get signed up for credit cards at airports? They’ve been doing it for years, presumably there’s some kind of measurable result.
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I fully agree with Alan’s comments. Having been Managing a Promotions Agency for 20 years, I have seen many clients fail in their approach from idea to implementation and wonder why the target audience have not been converted, or there has not been an increase of sales. Campaigns need to be created on a simpler basis and these ideas people need to be held more accountable.
Kim Gaston
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